


Unraveling

by jennandblitz



Series: Just a Jeepster for Your Love [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst and Porn, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Canon Compliant, Drinking, Drunk Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Happy Ending, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, Sad, Sad smut, Sirius Black POV, Sirius Black is Angry at the World, Sort Of, tipsy sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:47:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24186862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jennandblitz/pseuds/jennandblitz
Summary: Sirius is tired of sitting in Grimmauld Place, wasting away whilst everyone else is fighting the war. Sirius is tired of sitting in the parlour, staring at the Black family tapestry, and thinking of where it all went wrong.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: Just a Jeepster for Your Love [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1389226
Comments: 19
Kudos: 102





	Unraveling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alienfairyprincess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienfairyprincess/gifts).



> Thank you to @alienfairyprincess for this prompt that just _exploded_ in my mind and turned into 3k! I hope you like it, doll! Thank you to my twin @FivePips for the beta and encouragement for Sirius to live his best life. And thank you to you, for reading.

Sirius hates this house. He hates everything in it and everything it stands for. He _hates_ that he’s stuck here, under house arrest, hidden away. He hates seeing everyone come and go. He hates feeling so unimportant compared to people like _Snivellus_ , for Godric’s sake.

Most of all, Sirius hates this one particular wall. The family tapestry in the parlour room of Grimmauld Place was the seat of all the vile things in the world, it seemed. It loomed over him. Of course, he could go upstairs and hide away and drink Firewhisky and talk to Buckbeak, but this is his fucking house. He’s the only one left alive—thanks Regulus, you selfish fucking prick, disappearing—and this is _his house_ and if he wants to drink that Firewhisky whilst staring curses at his father’s portrait on the tapestry, then he bloody well can.

The house is empty, besides his shell of a body and the ghosts of his awful family, and it’s startlingly quiet. Sirius _hates it_. Whenever it’s quiet, Sirius can hear the screams of Azkaban, and so he drinks. He stares, he hates. It feels like he’s nothing but hate right now, his knee jittering.

Downstairs, the door opens, and a brief moment later, footsteps draw closer. No one else would walk into this house as if he lives here, there were no more Blacks left, so it’s Remus. He’s been away on a mission, apparently. Sirius doesn’t want to think too much on it in case he gets too angry, too paranoid and doubtful. Instead he takes a swig of his Firewhisky.

“Padfoot?”

“Here,” Sirius mumbles, staring down Orion’s portrait.

“Hey…” Remus appears in the doorway, looking harrowed, tired, _old_. Fuck, they’re both thirty-five, and yet Sirius feels like he’s nineteen and fifty all at once. “Are you okay?”

Sirius shrugs, gestures with his glass. Perhaps it’s a common sight for Remus to come back, to come _home_ —because Remus lives here, sleeps in the guest room on the second floor, the one with the small bed, the one furthest away from Sirius’—to Sirius drinking and staring into space. Remus crosses the room and pulls up a chair next to his own, nudging his knee into Sirius’.

“Lemme have a drink?” Remus holds a hand out. There’s a gash across his knuckles that looks just-healed. Sirius wants to press his mouth to the tender, raw skin and make him better. But they don’t do that anymore. Everything has changed, of course it has, it’s been nearly fourteen years, and the bonds between them now are so different they may as well be different people. So Sirius feels useless, there’s _nothing_ he can do here. He can’t even help Harry, something he’d sworn he’d always do. So Sirius passes his former lover and his oldest friend— _only friend_ —the half empty bottle of Firewhisky.

“How’s it out there?” Sirius nods towards the window, reinforced with enough privacy and concealment charms that the whole of London could gather on the pavement and Sirius would be none-the-wiser. Voldemort himself could set up shop outside and Sirius wouldn’t know. He hates that.

Remus gives him a wry smile as he swallows the mouthful of Firewhisky. He’s always had a frankly astonishing metabolism, and he’s the only person Sirius knows who can drink ten shots of Veela vodka in thirty seconds and still be coherent after. Or at least, he _could_. Maybe thirty-five year old Remus can’t. “Dreadful, Pads,” he says, passing the bottle back to Sirius. His every word is coated in sarcasm and pessimism. “Everything is dire and the world is ending. But, cheers to this bottle of Ogden’s finest, hm?”

Wordlessly, Sirius tips the bottle in salute before taking a drink. “And I can’t do a thing about it. Stuck in this fucking place, staring at that fucking face,” he almost spits, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand as he looks back to Orion’s portrait.

“Staring competitions with the old man?” Remus asks, plucking the bottle back from him.

Sirius sneers, not dragging his gaze away from Orion’s painted eyes. Even in what was meant to be a flattering portrait, Orion looks cruel and cold. “Yeah, only time I’ve looked him in the eye and not gotten hexed for it.”

Remus chuckles softly, his chair creaking as he shifts back. Sirius still doesn’t look away from the tapestry, but he feels like he’s acutely aware of Remus next to him. He’s a little cool from being outside, and he smells of fresh air and cigarette smoke and _living_. It makes Sirius angry, desperately jealous, and _terribly_ endeared all at once. Being back in Grimmauld Place is like spinning a Time Turner in many ways. All the memories Sirius had blocked out or had ripped from him in Azkaban came rushing back. The bad ones came first, how viscerally unhappy he was when he was younger and trapped here, but then, slowly, the positive memories resurfaced. Only, they were tainted now too.

Sirius has a visceral memory of lying on his bed upstairs, reading a letter from Remus. The other boy, God, they had been sixteen, had gone to London for a weekend that summer, and discovered all this amazing music, met all these amazing people. Sirius didn’t know what the butterflies fluttering in his stomach meant until four months later when, seized by a sudden compulsion whilst they were sat in the dorms working on History of Magic homework and listening to Led Zepplin, Sirius had grabbed Remus’ jaw and pulled him in for a kiss. They don’t do that anymore.

At seventeen, Sirius received a letter from his mother. Strange, a letter and not a Howler. She’d offered him one last chance to come back to the family, to be the son they deserved. She’d offered him one last chance to leave that blood-traitor house, that half-blood boyfriend, those stalwart Gryffindor friends, and be a good son. Remus had clenched his jaw when he read it, his eyes no doubt lingering on _half-blood boyfriend_ , before setting it alight with an effortless wandless Incendio. In the dormitory that night, when Remus had crept over to Sirius’ bed—not that James and Peter didn’t know, but more than it was far less awkward—he’d tucked himself against Sirius’ chest and huffed a sigh.

_You know the first thing I do if we ever see your parents in Diagon, or on Platform 9 3/4 at the end of the term?_ Sirius had hummed for him to carry on, threading his fingers through Remus’ hair. _I’m gonna grab you and snog you bloody senseless. Hell, I’d drop to my knees and give you a blowie right there just to make your mother keel over from shock, the harpy._ Sirius had murmured something lurid about a demonstration right now, and then the conversation had gone no further.

Now though, sat staring at his parent’s portraits, Firewhisky lining his throat like the spread of wildfire, it’s all Sirius can think about. Maybe he’s legitimately losing his mind, now. Azkaban, Grimmauld Place, locked in dark places he can’t escape, but he thinks of shoving Remus against the tapestry and kissing him so hard their lips bruise, thinks of letting Remus fuck him, pressed against the tapestry in one final _fuck you_ to Orion and Walburga.

Another slug of Firewhisky. “Remember that letter in sixth year?” Sirius asks, sloshing the remnants of the amber liquid around in the bottle.

Remus shoots a look sideways at him. The quirk of his eyebrow tells Sirius that he does. It’s been years and they’re different people, but somewhere, amongst all the trauma, the loneliness, the grief, there are facets of the people they used to be. “That last ditch attempt from that harpy herself?”

“Yeah.” Sirius hands him the bottle, looks back to his mother’s portrait. Fuck you, he wants to say to her, fuck you, fuck you and the fact you’re still here and _I’m_ still here. “Remember what you said after?”

“Yeah, I do.” Remus gives the tiniest sigh, but Sirius latches onto it. What does that mean? He doesn’t want to remember? Or is he looking back wistfully, recalling those words? Is his mind in whatever gutter Sirius’ is in right now? Does he want it to?

Sirius hazards a look sideways to him. “Yeah?”

“Christ Sirius, are you a fucking mimic charm?”

“Oh fuck off Remus,” Sirius fires back, practically snatching the bottle back from him. “Never mind, forget I said fucking _anything_.” He stands, taking the Firewhisky with him. “I’m going to bed.”

In a second, Remus’ fingers are shackled around Sirius’ wrist, stopping him from moving any further. For a fleeting second Sirius wants to yank his arm away and turn and punch Remus square in his already crooked nose, but the idea of two broken old men, a gaunt ex-prisoner, half dead already, and a battered werewolf, fighting it out makes him both want to laugh and cry.

“What?” Sirius barks, looking back over his shoulder at Remus.

He’s still sitting down, but on the edge of his chair now, and his brown eyes are wide and staring up at Sirius. Those are the eyes he saw right before he leaned in and kissed his lover, fifteen years ago, those are the eyes he’d look into when they woke up on Sunday afternoons, tangled together. “What about what I said after?” Remus asks, so soft it’s barely a breath.

“Just to make her keel over from horror, you said.” Sirius can’t look away from Remus’ eyes. It’s 1980 and Remus is in bed next to him on a balmy evening, and he can just look, and look, and look.

Remus nods, blinks.

“So do it.”

“She’s dead, Padfoot,” Remus says, as if he’s shutting down a wild prank idea Sirius and James had concocted because _of course Pince will see you, you absolute Skrewts. Do this instead._

“Make her roll in her grave then.” Sirius juts his chin towards the tapestry. “Him too.”

Remus drops his hand from Sirius’ wrist. He feels untethered, and it’s not a comfortable feeling. “We were…” _In love? Hopeless optimists? Young, full of life?_ “We were _us_ , then,” Remus settles on eventually. “And… and we’re not now.”

“Take it back, then.” Sirius can feel bile in the back of his throat. He’s not sure if it’s too much Firewhisky or the raw combination of vulnerability and fractured need bubbling there. “I’m fucking _sick_ of sitting here and doing nothing. I feel like a spare fucking bludger, Moony. People are out there, trying to hurt Harry, Molly’s kids, _you_ , for Merlin’s sake, and I can’t do _anything._ I just sit here and _wait_ , and I’m not doing it any more.”

With a sudden rush of movement, Sirius grabs Remus’ shoulder and hauls him up out of his seat. Remus resists, stepping back. “Sirius,” he says, like it’s a warning.

Sirius scoffs. “If there’s _one thing_ I fucking accomplish before I get AK’d, it’s offending my dead fucking parents. I want their _ghosts_ ashamed of me.”

Remus’ hard features soften just a fraction. “Sirius, you’re not going to—”

That’s it. Sirius kisses him. He knows he shouldn’t, but his fingers still fit around Remus’ jaw just so, just like in the dormitory in 1975 and Remus makes a soft noise into the kiss. The Firewhisky bottle doesn’t crack when it hits the carpet beneath their feet, dropped so Sirius can slide his other arm around Remus’ waist and anchor them together.

Remus’ fingers are shaking ever so slightly as they cup Sirius’ face. It’s too tender, and it makes Sirius’ insides _hurt_. He nips at Remus’ bottom lip and presses their foreheads together as he tilts a little to speak. “Do it, Moony. I want you to do it, do it.”

“Pads--” Remus’ voice is muffled, his mouth pressed against Sirius’. He sounds as if he’s trying to hold something back. He sounds like he used to in the Shrieking Shack right before moonrise, when he’d try to cling to his humanity before the wolf took over. But it’s not the wolf pushing at the edges of him now, it’s the particular way he and Sirius used to fit together, the chemistry, the heat, the energy. Sirius feels it too, but he’s always let those things govern him.

“Do it, Moony.” Sirius steps back, pulling Remus with him, back towards the moth-eaten tapestry. Remus steps with him, leaning in to kiss Sirius again, hard, desperate, hungry.

“We…” Remus starts, then trailed quickly off in favour of taking Sirius’ lower lip and sucking it softly into his mouth. Before Sirius realises, his back is pressed against the tapestry, and _all_ he can see is Remus. It’s not 1975 anymore, it’s not 1980, it’s 1995 and they’re both _here_. They’re alive, and Remus’ hair is threaded with silver and Sirius’ fingers _still_ wind so wonderfully through it.

“Moony,” Sirius breathes.

Remus looks at him, peering as if Sirius’ silver eyes are a Pensieve he can dive into. “Fuck. I want to, you want to?”

In lieu of an answer Sirius grinds his hips forward against Remus’. Remus’ half-hard cock presses against his thigh and his own twitches beneath his robes, already throbbing painfully. And that’s all Remus needs.

With a combination of fumbling hands, both their robes are out of the way, and Remus is pressing Sirius back against the tapestry. It’s been years since Sirius has used a lubrication charm, or that muscle relaxant charm he had learned in 1979 because he could never quite breathe deep enough to make bottoming comfortable. Sirius had been inside Remus enough and heard him ramble about how good Sirius felt in him, that he’d wanted to give it a try. It had been _glorious_ , in the spare room of James and Lily’s flat, Sirius biting his own hand to keep quiet through moans.

Now, he’s a different person, and the Remus here is different too. He wants Remus. He wants Remus to fuck him against his family tapestry. He wants to make the whole Black family scream. He wants their ghosts to be as angry and unhappy as he is here.

Sirius has one leg hitched up around Remus’ waist, the other tangled in Remus’ hair, as Remus’ works him open. He’s thankful for that relaxant charm, because he doesn’t want to have to think or feel anything less than inordinate pleasure. The charm means only a moment later Remus is deep inside him and Sirius has his head thrown back against the tapestry with a moan flying from his mouth. His loose hair is clinging to the fabric like climbing ivy to the outside of the Potter’s cottage.

“Oh _fuck_ , Sirius,” Remus says, peppering kisses all over the side of Sirius’ face from jaw to temple and panting hard.

“Yeah, do it Moony, fuck me,” Sirius rasps out in response, raking his fingers over Remus’ shoulders. His nails are broken and bitten and it probably draws blood but Sirius doesn’t care and Remus gives the most beautiful noise at the sensation. Sirius clenches around him, and he can’t tell if it’s the fact this is the first time he’s even felt anything close to goodness in fifteen years, or because it’s _Remus_ , but he’s on the edge of orgasm already.

Remus stretches up, pressing closer, deeper, his hips snapping and rolling against Sirius’ in a complete lack of rhythm but it’s exactly that that robs Sirius of his very breath. He kisses Sirius, soft and desperate, tongues and open mouths, the scrape of teeth over sensitive skin.

“Fuck, you’re so—you feel so—” Remus has his eyes closed, his cheeks flushed.

“Harder.”

Sirius blinks and Remus has pulled out of him. He feels bereft and he’s not done here, it’s not ending yet. Before he can protest, Remus has hauled him around and pressed him against the tapestry. Sirius steadies himself with one hand over the portrait of his grandmother Irma, and the other over some man he doesn’t care enough about to read because then Remus is pushing back into him and fucking him just as hard as he’d told him to.

“ _Shit_. I bet, I bet this feels good. Fucking me, a snobby fucking Pureblood—” Sirius breaks off to moan, dropping his chin to his chest as he meets Remus for every thrust, unrelenting against his prostate and making him see stars— “whose mother fucking hated you. Def—fucking—defiling her _heir_ like this?”

Remus’ hand goes to Sirius’ hair, winding through the unwashed strands as he fucks him harder, deeper, faster. “Bet—bet this feels good too. Getting fucked by a dirty-blooded werewolf, getting fu—fucking ruined?”

Sirius presses his forehead against the tapestry, a shorn-off, emotion filled moan slipping from his lips. Godric, this is what he needs, this is what he wants here, he wants to do everything he can to piss off the things that haunt him. He rakes his broken fingernails down the tapestry and presses his hips back, every thrust of Remus’ cock inside him making his eyes nearly roll back. “Shit, I’m gonna come—”

That only makes Remus moan louder, his fingers tighten on Sirius’ hip and through his hair. “Yeah, fuck, do it,” he says between panting. “Come all over the fu—fucking tapestry. Like the filthy traitor you are.”

That’s it, that’s what pushes Sirius over the edge into ecstasy and completion. Remus is calling him filthy, but Sirius knows what he means. Filthy traitor, somewhere along the line just after Sirius had ran away from home and there was a Howler every morning at Hogwarts for him, had become a compliment. Filthy traitor, better than them. Filthy traitor, with morals, compassion. Filthy traitor, doing what was good and _right_. Filthy traitor, coming in rivulets over the family tapestry, from his half-blood, half-breed lover’s cock.

Sirius shudders as he comes, watching the thick, pearly fluid slide down the embroidery, over the silver flecked thread of decoration. It ignites something in the base of his stomach, as he hears Remus moaning against his shoulder blade and the heat of him coming inside Sirius. Remus’ knees must buckle, as they’re both coming down, because they end up sprawled at the foot of the wall.

“Jesus…” Remus wraps his arms around Sirius, pressing his cheek against Sirius’ rapidly rising and falling chest.

Sirius filters shaking fingers through Remus’ hair and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Still don’t know who that bloke is.”

Remus’ chuckle reverberates through Sirius’ chest like a revivification charm. He closes his eyes, wants to frame this moment, preserve it forever. “You’re ridiculous,” Remus mumbles.

“Ridiculous filthy traitor, hm?” Sirius’ insides feel warm for the first time in so long. Somewhere nearby the nearly-empty bottle of Firewhisky is sinking into the carpet, and Sirius’ come is seeping into the family tree. He’s the last of the line, and this is the hill he chooses. Here, with Remus.

“Yeah.” Remus smiles indulgently. “But _my_ filthy traitor.”


End file.
